Anting

I am staying in a small garage apartment in Camden, Maine.  There are windows in the main room that look out onto a congregation of lovely trees, including a spectacular Eastern white pine, perhaps 80' tall.  A tree I'd be willing to fall on my knees before.

Looking out a window yesterday, I saw a fluttering of black near a rock nearby. The black was twisting and writhing.  Birds?  

Trusty binoculars at hand, I picked them up and focused.  Two crows.  They were moving about in the dirt on their bellies.  They were flashing their wings, often changing places, one moving over and around the other.  Constantly shifting.  Like a modern dance but an amateur one.

It seemed more intense than a normal dirt bath.  It went on and on.  Then one bird suddenly hopped onto a plank nearby.  Began preening.  Extensive beak work on the wings and feathers.

Then it was all over.  They flew away.

I went down to have a look.  I saw near the rock: hundreds of ants racing about, at double-speed, like a miniature Grand Central Station at 5:35pm on a Friday.  Heavy traffic!  Well, they'd just been stirred up by two black tornadoes.

What was...the deal?

I went upstairs and Googled, well, "Crows and ants."  And lo and behold, "Anting" came up.

"Anting is a maintenance behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin," Wiki says. 

A word and an activity in 75 years of living I'd never encountered.  Here's what Stanford University has to say about it:

"The purpose of anting is not well understood, but the most reasonable assumption seems to be that it is a way of acquiring the defensive secretions of ants primarily for their insecticidal, miticidal, fungicidal, or bactericidal properties and, perhaps secondarily, as a supplement to the bird's own preen oil." 

Come to think of it, how did the crows know that there were ants there?  A rush hour of ants?  I'd walked by the rock many times and not noticed ants.

Let there be mysteries.  

Fog

Driving from Belfast, Maine back to Camden, I run into a sweep of fog.  I’d been driving through full sunshine up until then. My car climbed and descended a small hill, and there it was: a white presence drifting over the hills and the road before me.  The road is not a half-mile from the sea, so it makes sense.  Still, a surprise.

Fog like this—not obscuring the road completely for the foreseeable future and so not striking fear in a driver—is a delight.  Just enough white to be called fog and yet not enough to be perilous.   Fog can be treacherous, but not today.

The fog is delicate, snowy, insubstantial; yet it’s there.  I know it’s entirely water, yet, unlike water, how graceful and airy and white it is.

When fog moves, it often drifts, taking its good time, like a jellyfish being eased on by the current.

Sometimes, of course it stubbornly sits there, unmovable, the last person at the party. 

The poet Marianne Moore writes about an ocean storm: “It is a privilege to see so / much confusion.”  I think it’s a privilege to see this little world of fog. I bask in it.

After five minutes of driving, I’m through its presence and back in sunlight. Regrettably.

Was I seeing things? 

Who knows why there was fog in just one short stretch of land and road and nowhere else?  There’s a reason, of course.  But I think if I knew that reason, the science that is, I’d be the less for it.

Leave me with my child-like wonder.

Seventy-five

Today, I turned seventy-five.

You kidding?  I think you have the wrong man.  Seventy-five is an age for, for old people.  Not for me.  Who's seventy-five, or 75?  Eleanor Roosevelt.  Walt Whitman.  Miss Havisham.  The Pope.  Not me. 

I feel like someone has give me a coat that I didn't order and that is too big for me and told me to put it on.

"I don't want to put it on," I say.  "It doesn't fit."

"Put it on anyway.  You don't have a choice."

Ok.

I was talking about this to a friend yesterday.

"Jesus, I'll be seventy-five tomorrow!"

"Age is just a number," she said.

"Yes, and in my case, a big one."

That guy who jauntily walked down the streets of New York City in 1975, age 30, is now 75?  No—he's still the same guy.  Still filled with a sense of wonder at everything around him.  Depressed, yes, now, because of the maelstrom outside.  But that's not unique to me.  Mostly, getting up wide-eyed.  Sap flowing.  

Speaking of that.

Looking out my window in Maine I see an eighty-foot Eastern white pine not fifty yards away, partially shrouded in fog. ("Shrouded" perhaps a tad unfortunate choice of word.)  It's noble as any king or queen who ever lived—maybe more so.  Looming, with huge branches going in awkward directions for reasons I wish I knew.  Silent, uncomplaining, constant.  Ancient, witness to so many comings and goings of us pipsqueak humans.  Breathing, too, like me.  Useful, earning its keep, many times over.  Breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.  I just read one large tree can supply a day's oxygen for up to four people.

Old tree, a lot older than me, let me look up to you.  Let's take a deep breath, both of us.  Still many things to do.

Living in a new place for a short time and trying to understand how everything works

I've rented a small apartment in Maine for a brief stay.  It's the first time I've stayed in this place.  Everything is new.  The shower, kitchen, windows, front door, closets, bathroom.  

Every time I stay in a new place, it's the same situation.  I have to fiddle with shower handles to discern the right balance between hot and cold, something I've long established in my own place.  Several screams later, I begin to make the proper adjustments.  Finally, after perhaps a week, sometimes even longer, I determine precisely how to reach that correct balance of hot and cold water to produce the ideal shower.

The process is the same with everything.  My stove, for example, has new mysteries of oven temperature to deal with.  Is its 350 degrees the same as my stove's at home? What about the burners?  They're electric, not gas, like mine.   The cultures are entirely different between gas and electric.  This adjusting takes up almost two weeks.  In the process, I burn several dishes, and myself.

Lamps, windows, cabinets, even chairs--they all require learning curves.  Where's that switch to turn this &^%$# lamp off?

Finally, after four weeks, I think I've learned how to make everything work according to my own particular routines and predilections.

The time to leave is just around the corner.

I can't take these highly honed skills and newfound knowledge anywhere else.  They only fit here, in this apartment.  

Maybe I could loan myself out as a kind of apartment docent to anyone else who rents this place.

"Now,  you'll notice this window shade is rather temperamental.  I would  suggest an angled pull on the cord, with the slightest tug at the end...."

Like everyone else, I just want to be useful.

Farewell, Cake Cafe

It's hard to calculate a loss like this.  How do you measure warmth, conviviality, a sense of welcome, an always interesting mix of people, eclectic servers, and wonderful, heartwarming food?  How do you calibrate a sense of home?  Of a place that satisfied your belly and your soul?  That was relaxed, fun, colorful and faithfully reflected the Marigny, the New Orleans neighborhood it served so openheartedly.

Steve Himelfarb and Becky Retz, owners and partners. They earned every bit of the popularity bestowed upon the Cake Cafe.  The place was packed on the weekends, lines outside, people coming for a substantial breakfast—my favorite: the poetic homemade corned beef hash.  There was always robust coffee and a sense that they were glad you were there.

Some things need to be mentioned.  Steve's king cake, ranked high in the city. (Those reading this not from New Orleans who want to know what a king cake is, read this.)   I ordered one every year.  I ate a lot of their celebrated cupcakes, too.  But in the interest of not having to buy new pants every six months, I stopped.  Nearly.

On the weekends, Steve in back in the kitchen, you were greeted by Becky.  She had a small pad, took your name, asking if you wanted a table inside or out.  And however crowded it was, you got that table much sooner than later.  It was always so heartening to be greeted by her sunny disposition.

I don't like writing this.  I don't like the idea of not being able to go to the Cake Cafe any more.  Change your minds, Steve and Becky!  Don't leave me out in the cold, away from your embrace. Like so many places we come to love and to depend on to give us a big dose of the better things in life, the loss will hit us hard.  Has, already.

Cry

I woke up today with a hangover.  Not a booze-inflicted hangover.  A crying hangover.  Yesterday afternoon, I wept uncontrollably for an hour at least. I don't remember how long it actually was.  It all gushed out, the despair I'd been closeting in my heart.  I couldn't contain it any more.  My hands to my face, I let the dam burst, and I couldn't stop it. I wept and wailed, and, like a cut vein, the pain gushed and gushed.  Like a rain-soaked cloud, it poured and poured and poured, a hurricane of pain, a typhoon of pain and distress and hopelessness.  It had been brewing for months, but I'd contained it, until something set it off, I don't know what.  Somehow, my heart had become saturated.  I was on the phone with my brother, and I had to hang up.  I could feel it coming, and I couldn't stop it, didn't want to stop it.  

And I not only wept, I wailed, throwing out desperate question after desperate question. I don't know the answers.  Why?  Why did it end up like this?

The complete vulnerability, nakedness, all of it poured out of my eyes and throat.

And afterward—you all know this—stunned and exhausted, wrung out, nothing left, nothing.  

No answers.  But surrender.  Blessed surrender.

The release of those pent-up feelings, overcoming the instinct to keep in control, for God's sake, not to mention the sense, in my case at least, that it's unmanly to cry—to break past that and let it happen. Finally. 

Masked

I've been wearing masks for years.  I have an entire metaphorical closet full of them.  For all occasions and all times.  I made them all myself, actually.

I wear them to protect myself.  Not from any virus.  But from people knowing who I really am.

These masks are so cleverly constructed it's hard to tell I'm wearing one.  At least, that's the goal.

So now when I go to the grocery store or to the pharmacy with a literal mask, surgeon-ready, I'm relieved.  I don't have to go to the elaborate stages of putting on one of my many false faces to hide behind.  This real mask does all the work for me.

The relief of not being seen.